War is hell, and hell is other people. In this serviceable account, Edmonds assures us that both adages are true.
Sometimes-harrowing memoir of time spent on the battleground in Iraq and its psychic consequences.
Most of the literature of the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures has come from enlisted personnel, who bear the lion’s share of the fight. This memoir is unusual in that it comes from a high-ranking officer, just two grades down from general, deployed in the field in the dreadful year of 2005. It also comes from an officer who, since he was attached to an Iraqi unit as an adviser, did not have to observe all the niceties of war. Edmonds participated in numerous interrogation sessions, and the longer he did so, he writes, “the less certain and more conflicted I became about the right and wrong of everything.” The lessons he learned—some of which he imparts here—about how to grill a prisoner effectively are downright chilling. He recounts, for example, an Iraqi officer, late of Saddam Hussein’s army, telling him that the key is to be alternately frightening and friendly: “Going from comfort to terror to comfort, then terror, over and over again; soon even the strongest will give in.” Adding to his alienation was a girlfriend back home who wasn’t providing all the moral support she might. Adrift without an anchor and increasingly unsold on the mission—as he writes, “I hate it when Iraqis ask me to account for the shit that other Americans do”—Edmonds sank into the depression and emotional maelstrom of PTSD. Though he survived combat, the author leaves readers with the certainty that he will never again be who he once was. The narrative is a blend of rhetorical questions, staccato dialogue, and plaintive observations. Edmonds doesn’t reach the depth attained in recent books by Ben Fountain, Phil Klay, or Michael Pitre, but he does provide a useful adjunct to the work on PTSD done by Jonathan Shay and other writers and analysts.
War is hell, and hell is other people. In this serviceable account, Edmonds assures us that both adages are true.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-774-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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